Dear List -
I am posting this for a friend of mine who is working hard to also
promote change.
She has a limited amount of time to get this done asks
that anyone with first hand experience or professional knowledge of how
devastated women can be and how the opportunity to speak up about this
after a traumatic birth would NOT do "more harm than good". She
needs this by the end of January.
Here is her letter - Anyone who has the time to reply can post a
reply to her at the snail mail address listed. Thank you so
much.
Rhonda.
"Dear Rhonda,
I basically need some letters from women who have had an emergency
caesarean saying that their delivery did lead them to feel distress
afterwards, and that they would have welcomed the opportunity to
fill out a questionnaire asking them about their true feelings -
that it would *not* have made them feel worse to do
so.
Currently, the ethics committee (mostly men, with several
doctors on board) is trying to block my woman-benefiting research,
by arguing that the increased 'distress' put upon women by asking
them questions a month after the birth is not outweighed by the
potential benefits of the research (which sounds awfully like an
attempt to silence women's voices and prevent change!). But I am
arguing that not only are there huge benefits to women overall from
the research, but that it is not going to harm emergency caesarean
women, by asking them how they feel. Rather, it might actually make
them feel better!
I know I would have welcomed someone that
gave a damn about how I really felt! And I would have liked to have
known that I was not alone in how I felt too. I also would have been
reassured to know that there were people working to make things
better for women in the future so that they didn't have to go
through what I did.
So anyway, if you'd like to write a brief
letter (can be less than a page, or whatever you like) for me to
include with my reply to the ethics committee, to help get this
research off the ground, you can send it to me at:
Ms Robyn
Henriksen, P.O. Box 552, Geelong, Vic. 3220
I have to send
my reply to the committee's 'concerns' in two weeks, so if you
wanted to contribute, it would have to be within that time. Thanks
for any support you can give, Robyn."
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